Although few in number and limited in scope, Kant's writings on international relations have had a lasting influence and have given rise to a wide range of interpretations. Kant's famous pamphlet, Perpetual Peace, has been seen as advocating federalism, world government, a League of Nations-type security system and outright pacifism. Underlying much of the debate on Kant lies a divergence over the relationship between what might broadly be called the ‘statist’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ sides of Kant's writings. On one side, there are those who argue that Kant is primarily concerned with order at the level of interstate relations. Kant, it is argued, did not want to transcend the state system but to improve it. He wanted to subject the international anarchy to law and to find a solution to the problem of war but in a way which would not sacrifice the essential autonomy and independence of states.

The discipline of International Relations has long had an uneasy relationship to revolution. Hannah Arendt's remark that the twentieth century has been shaped by wars and revolutions is often quoted, but it is striking how, within the institutionalized research and teaching on International Relations, these two historically formative processes receive differential treatment. Courses, journals, departments and institutes on war are plentiful. Study of war, in its historical, strategic and ethical dimensions, as well as in policy terms, is central to the academic study of IR. Revolutions, by contrast, enjoy a marginal existence. Standard textbooks and theoretical explorations devote little space to them. There is no journal specializing in this question. We have yet to meet the Oliver Cromwell Professor of Revolutionary Studies: there are no invitations to speak at the Thomas Paine International Institute for the Comparative Study of Revolutionary Change.

What does it mean to think like a Realist? The question is important in the study of international politics. According to a recent survey of the field, more than 90 per cent of the hypotheses tested by behaviourists in international politics were Realist in conception. A wider survey of the field taken in 1972 (which included those more historically inclined) identified the American Realist Hans Morgenthau as the leading scholar of international relations and his Politics Among Nations as the leading book. The overwhelming majority of other prominent postwar general theorists have worked inside the Realist tradition.

The term ‘Special Relationship’ can give the false impression that Britain and the US have related to each other in an unchanging way since the forging of close bonds during World War II. If, like the present author, one chooses to use this terminology it is important to identify how the relationship has changed over the years.

This article focuses on the period 1961–67, which was an important period of transition. In 1961, Suez notwithstanding, it was possible for British leaders to continue to think in terms of drawing on unique links with the US, some of which had been forged in World War II and still existed, others which had been developed in their common struggle against communism. By 1967 some of these links had been broken and others greatly weakened for a variety of reasons. Britain's relative world power had continued to decline, thus reducing her usefulness to the US; Britain began to look seriously to the EEC for its future and away from the US, which, for its part, was becoming increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam and the Far East in general; the economic structure Britain and the US had designed to manage the free world's. economy and in the direction of which they had cooperated extensively began to breakdown; and finally after the Kennedy–Macmillan friendship there was no really close relationship between British and American leaders until the mid-1970s. Before looking at this period of transition, however, it is necessary to review an earlier era when the Special Relationship was unquestioned.

The point of this article can be quickly made: it is just that, there is a big difference between the financial power exercised by the United States and that exercised by Japan, and that the difference is partly explained by the role of information in the global financial structure. It also happens that this difference is a rather good illustration of the difference between structural power and relational power.

What I am comparing is the structural power to extend or restrict the range of options open to others which has been, and still is, exercised by the United States in the postwar decades, in this case specifically in the field of finance, with the relational power which Japan exercises in the same field of finance by virtue of its position as the world's major creditor country and aid donor.

Have you noticed how academics specializing in British or American foreign policy are considered generalists while specialists on Chinese or Japanese foreign policy are considered 'mere' practitioners of area studies? Is it not curious when supposed journals of International Relations (like this one) have special numbers on balance of power theory and rarely draw examples from East Asia? This myopic mid-Atlanticism among students of International Relations reaches 'down' to the media world: how many realize that the majority of the troop cuts announced by Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1988 are coming from Asia.